Looking for a safe to keep my Gatorade

Generally, this is not why people invest in safes. Mostly, they want to store their Rolex watches or bearer bonds or cash they're hiding from the law.

I don't have any of those things, I say with deep regret.

But what I do have are two teenage kids who can devour a case of Gatorade faster than a piranha could strip Nemo.

Lately, I've been shopping for a cheap safe that's small enough to keep in my tiny bedroom, but large enough to hold Gatorade and other things that need to be rationed around my two omnivorous children.

It also needs to contain my extensive liquor cabinet, which should really be locked up now that I have teenagers.

My fabulous cocktail bar consists of three bottles of cheap wine, a liter of tequila, plus a couple of beers I keep around for my friend Scott. He doesn't like wine.

Like many sophisticates, I used to have a large, rotating booze collection. I needed a double-wide fridge just to hold the martini olives.

But now that we're middle-age parents, we're all such lightweights we get legally drunk just from smelling the corks. And the kids broke all the martini glasses using them as Barbie swimming pools.

The reason I need to lock up the Gatorade is that that the stuff is (a) expensive and (b) really not good for you.

I only reluctantly dole it out to my kids once a week on game days, when they would otherwise suffer severe emotional trauma by being the only ones on the field without colorful plastic bottles of sugar, salt and chemicals.

When it's not hidden, the stuff never makes it to game day. Instead, I find the entire house littered with half-empty plastic bottles. Occasionally, I have other valuables that also need to be locked up, including bags of Oreo cookies and lunch packs of Cheetos.

I had a couple of locksmiths look at my kitchen cabinets, and they both opined that I'd be better off buying a safe or locking cabinet to store my stuff than trying to drill into the cheap, crappy finishes.

When Shep wondered aloud what kind of purses needed their own safe, the woman explained that she was carrying an Hermes purse at that very moment, worth $20,000.

I've never even had a car worth $20,000. I really don't want to reflect on that, so let's move on.

According to Shep, lots of clients now come from the medical marijuana industry. He's selling an awful lot of large safes to those folks, and you can imagine why.

You certainly wouldn't want criminals coming in and stealing your controlled substances. You want those criminals to obtain a prescription, buy them in your store like everyone else, and only then resell them at a markup to teenagers at my kid's high school.

You also wouldn't want your entire inventory of Maui Wowie and California Dream going up in smoke, and getting the entire neighborhood high in the process. That would definitely be bad for business.

I stopped by Shep's store the other day and saw a lot of really cool safes that are way out of my price range, including fancy, custom-made jewelry safes. He even sells a safe that will automatically rotate your Rolex watches, so they'll stay wound while they're being stored.

I hate pulling my Rolex out of the safe and finding that it has to be reset, don't you? Fortunately, I have a flunky on staff who does that sort of thing for me.

Shep also showed me a safe he said one of his customers had bought at Costco.

It looked big and strong, except for one thing: It was lying on its side, in two pieces. Shep told me the combination lock broke, and the owner couldn't find the key, so his 17-year-old assistant grabbed a screwdriver and took the door off in about two minutes.

It would probably take my son five minutes to get it open and score the Gatorade. Maybe not the definition of the word "safe."

I must say I was fascinated by the tiny gun safe that only opens to your fingerprints, so you can keep your pistol right next to your bed and grab it easily when you hear Lindsay Lohan downstairs, but the kids can't get it open to play cops and robbers.

Someday, I fully intend to buy one of Shep's safes when I win the lottery and have a lot of Hermes purses to store. Or my kids can buy the mini-safe to keep in my nursing home room, to keep the pesky nurses out of my stash.

Until then, I'll keep looking for a Gatorade safe. If it could be refrigerated, so much the better.